"If they give me enough money to be able to get myself a house in Baghdad, I would be more than happy to leave," said al-Jabar, whose husband was in the army before he retired. "It was the housing crisis that brought us here."

Al-Jabar said she fears that the Kurds will someday throw her out of her apartment.

"I'm afraid to go to sleep at night lest they storm the house. They might blow us up," she said.

But she acknowledged that no Kurd has threatened her. Other Arabs say they too are afraid of Kurdish reprisals, and also say there have been no direct threats, only rumors.

"We see the slogans on walls," said Raad Seifi, 20.

Taboor a-Sadi, 64, a Shiite, has been here since 1989 because he did not have anywhere to live when he moved out of his brother's house.

Taboor prefers to stay put in Kirkuk.

"I am free to live wherever I choose," he said. "Kirkuk is an Iraqi city and I am an Iraqi citizen."

Fear and rumor — the legacy of decades of a dictatorship that discouraged independent thought and the free flow of information — seem to be behind much of the Arab fear.

Muhanad Sabah Naeimi, a 25-year-old unemployed Sunni who arrived seven years ago, insisted that Kirkuk belongs to Arabs rather than Kurds, whom he described as migrants from Europe.

"Kurds are from southern Europe," Naeimi said. "They came from Italy... This is a known fact."

In fact, historians believe the Kurds, a Muslim people who speak a language related to Persian, have lived in the Middle East for thousands of years.

In the 1980s, Saddam launched Operation Anfal (search) — a scorched-earth campaign against the Kurds that claimed as many as 182,000 Kurdish lives and flattened 4,000 villages. But some Arabs say accounts of the offensive are propaganda.

Sheik Ahmed Khalaf, a cleric in the Arab village of Bir Dahab, insisted that Saddam favored the Kurds because "they didn't serve in the army and didn't have to fight in wars."